The Silver Wolf (11 page)

She spun around, her back against the wall, and looked around desperately. The insulas surrounding the alley were three stories tall … Three stories straight up. Smooth surfaces of narrow terracotta brick up to the cold, gray sky.

The wolf tried to come, tried to draw Regeane into the change and—couldn’t. She was too weak. She subsided when she seemed to realize in her dark heart that she was only draining the woman’s strength.

The footsteps sounded closer now. Hurrying

“Hisst!” The voice called from close to her feet. The opening was so clogged with debris, she’d missed seeing it.

“Hurry!” the child’s voice called. “If you keep dithering, he’ll have you.”

“I’m not dithering,” Regeane snapped in a hissing whisper. “Is it big enough?”

“Yes … maybe … well, I don’t know.” This a wail. “I went down so fast, I don’t know. But, please—”

The mercenary appeared at the entrance of the cul de sac. Her panicked brain estimated he was approximately three times her size. Another part of her brain presented her with a really gruesome picture of her upper body stuck in the drain while the soldier hacked at her lower body and legs with his sword.

Regeane’s hands cleared dead leaves and twigs aside. The wolf, a burrower, made a lightning calculation. Regeane dove for the hole.

With a shout of fury, the warrior leaped after her.

The tunnel was downhill, the walls slippery with slime.

The man’s hand closed on her ankle. Regeane screeched and
clawed desperately at the inside of the clay drain. It was too slick for a handhold.

Something gripped her hair and yanked. She shot out of the other end of the tunnel like a greased pig, landing right at the feet of the child, leaving one shoe in the soldier’s hand.

Shouts, evidence of the man’s frustrated rage, echoed in the pipe.

“Let go of my hair!” Regeane ordered as she got shakily to her feet.

The child looked offended. “You are lucky I got as good a grip on it as I did. You’re too fussy. You should have jumped in when I told you to.” The child tried to look up the drain, still reverberating with the soldier’s fury. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He can’t get through until he gets more of his armor off.”

“And it won’t take him long to do that,” Regeane said emphatically as she pulled the child away.

The courtyard was surrounded with two-story insula. Every door and window was closed and barred. Regeane could see no escape.

“Up,” the child said pointing to a row of stone balconies that ringed the second story of the houses. The balconies were tiny and shallow, but even in this poor quarter, each sported at least one pot of herbs and flowers. The nearest one held quite a few more. It offered at least a possibility of concealment.

Regeane snatched up the child and boosted her over the rail, then pulled herself up behind her. She tried the shutters with her fingers. Solid planks. She saw bolts at the bottom, middle, and top. No escape there.

The warrior slid out of the drain.

Regeane and the child crouched down behind the flowerpots and tried to make themselves as small as possible. The warrior down below turned in circles, scanning the empty courtyard. He may have discarded his armor, but he carried a large, lethal-looking sword. She remembered the cloth seller and shivered.

“It’s no good,” she said softly. “He will find us.”

She felt the little girl’s clutch tighten on her arm. She shook herself free and stood up. He was standing almost under the balcony.

She seized a pot of gray sage sporting long spikes of blue
flowers and dropped it on his head. She scored a direct hit, but it didn’t do much good. He was wearing his helmet.

He gave a roar of fury and turned, leaping for the balcony rail. He pulled himself up with one hand, sweeping the sword ahead of him to keep her off.

Regeane’s fingers closed on the lug handles of a big rosemary jar. She parried the sword’s backswing with it. The man’s wrist and sword hilt crashed into the jar. The warrior yelled again, this time in pain, and started to drop down.

Regeane was too quick for him. With all her strength, she smashed the bottom edge of the pot into his forehead.

Both man and pot went down, landing with a ringing crash on the flagstones. He rolled over amidst the dirt and broken crockery, getting to his hands and knees.

“Oh, God,” Regeane whispered. “No.”

“Yes,” the little girl said, her mouth set in a tight line. “He’s very obstinate.” She selected a clay pan of chamomile. This time when the soldier went down, he lay still.

Regeane stood leaning against the rail, gasping for breath and trembling.

“Why do they want to kill you?” the child asked. “What have you done?”

Regeane shook her head. “Nothing,” she answered, completely bewildered.

The little girl looked up at her, disbelief written in every line of her features. “You won’t tell me then,” she said, sounding deeply offended.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Regeane said. “Truly I don’t.”

“Maybe you’re right,” the child said pensively. “The way I cried in the square, that was shameful and you think me weak.” She looked up at Regeane with an expression of almost adult belligerence marred only by a slight protrusion of the lower lip. “But I’m not weak.” She climbed over the rail, dropped to the ground, and drew the fallen man’s knife.

Regeane scrambled down quickly to join her.

The little girl’s fingers were twined in the soldier’s hair.

Regeane cried, “No! It’s wrong. It’s dangerous. You are
not yet a free person and I’m a foreign woman. We might be punished.”

Crouching beside the man’s head, the little girl looked up at Regeane, an expression of disgust on her face. “You are making excuses. A fine protector you’ll be. Not even the courage to cut a man’s throat. I’d do better on my own.”

Regeane reflected that, for a number of reasons, this might be true, but she was determined not to let the child take the risk. The consequences were unacceptable. She had seen the grisly punishments visited on slaves.

She snatched up the child’s hand and pulled her away from the unconscious man. “No, you will not cut his throat. Come. We’ll try to find a way out of—”

Regeane broke off because the child’s expression changed suddenly from one of disapproval to one of terror.

“WHAT?” REGEANE ASKED.

The little girl reached inside her dress. She wore something around her neck—a piece of stone on a thong. She clutched it and whispered a low prayer in her own tongue and began to back away quickly.

Regeane heard footsteps. She spun around. A soft whimper of terror rose in her own throat.

The thing half limped, half shuffled toward her. Most of its body was covered by a heavy black cloak and hood, but what Regeane could see was bad enough. It held the hood over the lower part of its face with the stumps of fingers.

Bone protruded from dangling shreds of pale, rotten flesh. Inside the black cloth of the hood, the nose was half eaten away
by disease, the septum clearly visible. All around, the silver wolf smelled the stench of death, yet above the horror of the nose, two living eyes stared at Regeane. Eyes that were almost beautiful: large hazel eyes fringed with dark lashes.

“My garden,” it whispered. “You’ve ruined my little garden.”

It stopped, dropped to a crouch beside the broken pot of sage, the blue flowers blooming proudly amidst the dirt and shattered clay. It stroked the petals softly with one pale, bony index finger.

“My garden,” it keened softly to itself, “my poor little garden. It was all I had left.”

“I’m sorry,” Regeane stammered, “but the soldier was chasing us.”

“You still had no right to ruin Antonius’ garden,” someone screamed accusingly at Regeane.

The doors to the little piazza were opening. A young woman stood in one of them. Her long hair was hennaed bright red, showing black at the roots. She might have been pretty, but for the big hole in one cheek through which two rows of her teeth could clearly be seen.

A hand lifted Regeane’s skirt. Something giggled. She looked down.

It hopped along on the stumps of its legs. The arm attached to the hand was long and simian. The face was dished as if it had been bashed and flattened by a giant club. Mucus flowed from the nose, and drool spilled from a grinning mouth filled with the stubs of yellow teeth.

Regeane gave a stifled shriek and backed away.

The thing followed, reaching, chanting, “Pretty lady. Pretty lady.”

She backed into another, but this one only stared at her solemnly, a boy so deformed by his humped back that he scuttled on all fours. His eyes had a vacant stare. She realized as she twisted away from the thing’s hands that this one was blind.

They were everywhere, all around her. Every doorway and balcony held one or another twisted obscenity. Some bore the marks of torture and mutilation—noseless, eyeless, ears cropped, hands or feet stumps. Were they alive? Had she fled somehow into a quarter peopled only by the dead?

Regeane felt something clutching at the other side of her skirt. Her body jerked violently; then she realized it was the child clinging to her desperately, face buried in the folds of her gown. She put her arm around the little girl.

“She doesn’t like us,” the red-haired woman shouted with a shrill laugh. “Who asked you to bring your pretty face here and remind us of what we’ve lost? Get out.” She picked up a piece of broken flowerpot and threw it at Regeane.

They clustered around Regeane, hemming her in, their voices a cacophony of idiot babbling, giggling, and here and there, most frightening, a cry of hatred or rage.

Regeane felt a strange weakness. The wolf was trying to claim her. She sensed the quivering readiness to change, a frisson between the day-to-day world and the drifting wraiths of moonglow.

“For shame.” The voice was hoarse, yet commanding. It came from the first one Regeane had seen, the one who had bemoaned the ruin of his garden. He came forward, leaning on a long staff. The lower part of the hood was held up more tightly over the ruined face and now all she could see were those two oddly beautiful eyes gazing at her over the black cloth.

“For shame,” he repeated angrily. When he reached Regeane’s side, he swung the staff in a wide circle, driving back those who had crowded most closely around Regeane and the child.

“Here is a stranger come among us, seeking courtesy and protection.” The hooded head turned and looked at the soldier still lying in a heap on the stones of the street. “Whatever we are,” he said quietly, “we cannot be dead to all compassion or humanity. If that passes from among us, what will we become?”

The crowd fell silent. The gentle rebuke of the hooded one seemed to carry great weight among them.

“You, Drusis,” he spoke to the legless man, the one who had been trying to lift Regeane’s skirt. “Go fetch my brother.” He went on sternly. “Wash the rheum from your face. You’re not fit for the eyes of a gentle lady.”

To Regeane’s surprise Drusis looked abashed, hung his head, and hopped away quickly.

Then Antonius turned to Regeane. The clear, calm eyes
looked into her own. “Drusis will bring my brother,” he assured her, “and he’ll be able to lead you out of here. You must pardon the bad manners of my friends. It’s not often that an outsider strays into … the house of the dead.”

The little Saxon girl peered past the folds of Regeane’s skirt up at the hooded figure. “Are you then a dead man?” she asked fearfully.

The eyes shifted from Regeane’s face to the child’s. “Not quite,” he answered, “but the next thing to it. I am a leper.”

Regeane felt her knees grow weak, not with terror, but relief. The fear that she’d strayed into a precinct populated by those dim shapes she saw clustered at church porches or near cemeteries was dispelled. Compared with those, the poor deformed outcasts were not terrible, but pitiful.

“Oh,” she sighed, “thank God. I … I feared you might be … something else.”

The hazel eyes shifted back to her face and, if she wasn’t mistaken, the expression in them was one of mild perplexity.

“I believed you a ghost,” she explained.

“No,” he said calmly. “Soon enough, but not yet. Do you often see such things?”

“Yes,” Regeane admitted reluctantly, then qualified her statement. “Well, not so often. Only two or three times a year, but when it happens …”

There was a stir in the crowd. A man pushed his way through.

“What in the world …” he said, then stopped, looking in astonishment at Regeane.

The hooded leper turned to him. “Stephen, my brother, this lady and—” He indicated the child with a quick gesture of his hand. “—her little friend came here pursued by that one over there.” He pointed to the soldier, still lying amidst the dirt and shattered pots. “Please, if you would, conduct her to a place of safety.”

Stephen was a tall man, lean-faced, with a thatch of gray hair and an equally gray clipped beard which curled crisply at his chin. His dress was as simple as that of the Latin farmers Regeane saw every day driving their cattle and flocks to market, just a brown woolen tunic and sandals. He didn’t wear the mantle most of the freeborn men used as an overgarment, but
the ancient cloak of the people of the earth, a simple square of cloth with a hole cut out for the head and gathered in at the waist with a belt. Yet aside from his simple garb, there was something about him in the set of his shoulders and the firmness of the mouth under the strong jut of the nose that bespoke one used to authority, used to giving commands and having them obeyed.

“Crysta.” He spoke to the woman with the hole in her cheek. “Who does that belong to?”

The woman walked over and looked down at the warrior. “He’s one of Basil the Lombard’s followers. I can’t call his name, but Basil is his master.”

“Basil, eh?” A small wrinkle appeared between his brows. “What’s he doing here? You, Sixtus, Numerus.” He pointed to two men, one who had iron hooks for hands, the other lacking nose, ears, and part of his scalp. “Take that offal and dump it somewhere. I don’t want him to wake here.” Then he turned to Regeane. “You, my lady, follow me,” he said.